Teachers are required to prepare daily lesson plans on at least a weekly basis. Lesson plans are written directions that are prepared so a teacher has a teaching strategies and procedures for presenting the educational information via lessons and class curriculum required per their individual school policies and procedures. In most schools, the lesson plan is required to be available in the classroom, presented to the department head and in some instances, also made available to the school principal.
Classroom teachers have many duties, not the least being, creating and working with considerable amounts of non-teaching paperwork. Paperwork that includes creating, maintaining and publishing daily and weekly lesson plans. Lesson plans usually require the listing of the school, teacher, date, subject, time of class period, subject matter to be taught, and the teaching method to be utilized. In addition, it may list the necessary tools and/or materials required to teach that day. Also, special programs and/or activities may be listed.
Teachers have used pre-printed lesson plan forms and/or purchased pre-printed lesson plan booklets to provide them with the basic form(s) on which they develop the basic outline of the hourly and daily curriculum, materials and method(s) of instruction. Some preprinted forms provide for the teacher to manually insert the necessary curriculum, materials, and methods of teaching in a pre-determined but limited space. The pre-printed lesson plan booklets include pages for manual recording students names, addresses, personal data, parent and emergency information, grades, school and class curriculum, district and/or school holiday or in-service days as well as the pre-printed pages on which to develop the daily and weekly lesson plan(s).
Teachers must implement the teaching source materials and class curriculumas prescribed by their individual school, district and/or state education departments. Along with the school year schedule, teachers calculate their individual per hour/day/week teaching methods and materials, including text books and other educational resources and create a lesson plan. The purpose of the mandated lesson plan is to give direction to the classroom teacher so that the required materials used with curriculum, procedure, and methodology properly followed and completed. The lesson plan is also used to enable a substitute teacher to conduct the class and complete the prescribed lessons, procedure, methodology, curriculum, and materials as if the regular teacher was present.
Federal and state holidays are usually blocked on any pre-printed lesson plan form but individual district and/or school holidays and non-teaching in-service dates must be manually entered onto the lesson plan for publication.
Integrated word processing, data base and spread sheet software programs, such as Claris Works.TM., provide computer literate teachers with a tool for manually designing individual class grade books, student rosters and even rudimentary lesson plans. There are also some computer software programs, such as "Teachers Toolbox".TM., available that supply the teacher with some computer generated templates onto which the teacher must enter the necessary information on a weekly basis. Current lesson plan software merely supplants the need to hand enter the information using conventional writing tools.
The intent of this invention is to provide a generic as well as a specific lesson plan format generator, editor and publisher. Additionally, it includes a totally integrated classroom organizer, process, and manufacturer providing the teachers with the required lesson plan that reduces or eliminates the use of conventional writing tools. The integration feature of this invention also saves teachers' time by eliminating redundant and duplicate entries into multiple manual records.
There are numerous inventions detailing the creation of subject-specific lesson plans and/or multi-media collection of audio-visual materials that are assimilated into computer generated teaching methods and subject-specific course outlines and subject-driven lesson plans. U.S. Pat. No. 5,173,051 details a method and system of utilizing an information source to select, recall, order and translate subject-specific materials to an information repository (student). The information source(s) stated are listed are video-disks and CD-ROM's but may be any other type of information source, i.e. computer hard drives, storage tapes and/or floppy disks or even internet educational resources.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,176,520 details a computer assisted instructional information delivery system but limits its treatise to two or more stations and the utilization of a network communication system.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,385,475 details a system and method of connecting audiovisual output signals from audiovisual resources to develop, process, switch, and store selected audiovisual data for eventual selection and presentation and/or playback in specific lesson plan form for use on a monitor or on a network system.